The fog on the western edge of San Francisco is its usual summer thickness. It’s like wet smoke. Dense, low to the ground, blocking sight beyond twenty feet. Sound is ventriloquy. I’m in my summer coat, zipped up. The air is not just damp but the temperature of the unseen Pacific just a couple hundred yards away. It’s about 55-degrees Fahrenheit. Just in front of our house I hear American Goldfinches overhead. They are loquacious in flight. It’s the familiar chirping, what Rich Stallcup calls their “potato chip” call. Glancing up I see the small bird appear from the fog and then almost immediately vanish back into the soft gray. During our half hour walk through Sutro Heights Park the dog and I will occasionally hear those goldfinch calls. But we never see one again. Before this year I have always thought of American Goldfinches as sunny birds, beloved of grassy fields and warm summer days. But this year they are abundant here on the windy, foggy edge of the American continent.
American Robins are down on the lawn getting breakfast. Imagine gritty raw earthworms for a morning meal. Yum.
The local Raven pair have fledged their young for the summer, one perches in a cypress eyeing the dog and the slow-moving biped without feathers. Small droplets of water come down from the trees. Surely there is a tiny drop of water almost readyto drop from the tip of the young Raven’s beak. Fog precipitation is frequent and crucial beneath the dense pine and cypress trees. It’s how they get through the annual summer drought.
On the bluff above the ocean we can hear the Western Gulls, California sealions bark from their rocky perches offshore. A Black Oystercatcher must be flying about in the fog. I can hear the insistent, sharp “cak, cak, cak” callthey give when moving about. I don’t see any this. Even the ocean and its eternal waves are behind the morning’s gray veil.
Before we leave the park I catch the soft “ch-chink, ch-chink” mutterings of what is probably a family of Pygmy Nuthatches. Unseen, of course. High up in a cypress, perhaps hanging upside down as they probe for insects. Out of the fog comes a low-flying, black and angular shape. It’s one of the Barn Swallows. How can he hope to find any flying insects in this soup? Later I see the other adult and their three newly fledged young drooping on a power line outside the doorway where they bred. Their rounded shapes and the wetness make the birds seem almost liquid as well. The homeowners simply put down newspaper to catch the swallow poop as the adults busy themselves putting their mud nest atop the outside porch light. Sadly there’s only one Barn Swallow family in the nieghborhood this year. We suspect it’s because the park service has made some radical changes in how they manage Sutro Heights and Land’s End. There’s also a pair of Violet-green Swallows nesting under the tiles of a neighbor’s roof. This is a first in over 20 years of living in this area. We always get Tree Swallows in the big trees, and one year a Northern Rough-winged pair nested in a hole in the back of another home nearby. All swallow species like to swoop downhill to Sutro Baths, a manmade pool of fresh water next to the Pacific. It surely provides them lots of flying insects. Fresh water seasoned with Mallard and gull feces must be a fine source of nutrition for the insects.
